Title text:
The inflection point was probably in late 1966 or 1967, so when Neil Armstrong flew to space on Gemini 8, plate tectonics was not widely accepted, but when he landed on the Moon three years later it was the mainstream consensus.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3159/
According to A Short History of Nearly Everything, plate tectonics is a very new idea, within my lifetime new. I forget the numbers, but the author states that by the 1980s a large minority of geologists still didn't believe in it.
He prefaces this with stories of naturalists being puzzled over the age of the Earth. They couldn't explain what they had observed if the Earth was only 10s of millions of years old.
Awesome book BTW. It's a history of science, what we knew and when and how we figured it out.
Yes, plate tectonics is recent. But it explains how continents move. The comics says that before 1967, no thought they moved at all. Which is false.
Yeah but dinosaurs didn't exist because the Bible only kinda mentions them.
Bill Brysons books are amazing! Since you like Short History,I highly recommend At Home, also by Bryson.
Just found an epub!
I take everything he says with a grain of salt, though.
Yep. I later found inaccuracies in A Short History of Nearly Everything. Nothing that changed much, but still, I wasn't nitpicking either.
This is wise when reading or hearing anything
but then I would get salt overdose and high blood pressure